Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is the third installment in the Ice Age series and the second sequel of Ice Age. It was made by Blue Sky Studios and released by 20th Century Fox. It was released in July 1st, 2009 with a sneak preview shown nationwide at selected theaters on Father's Day in the USA. It is the first Ice Age movie to be released in digital 3D. Synopsis After the events of Ice Age: The Meltdown, life begins to change for Manny and his friends: Scrat is still on the hunt to hold onto his beloved acorn, while finding a possible romance in a female sabre-toothed squirrel named Scratte. Manny and his new wife Ellie are expecting a baby, which leaves Manny anxious to ensure that everything is perfect for when his baby arrives. Diego is fed up with being treated like a house-cat and ponders the notion that he is becoming too laid-back. Sid begins to wish for a family of his own, and so steals some dinosaur eggs which leads to Sid ending up in an underground world where dinosaurs roam free, and where his herd must rescue him, while dodging dinosaurs and facing danger left and right, and meeting up with a weasel known as Buck who hunts dinosaurs intently. Plot :Warnings: May contain spoilers and if you haven't seen this yet, then this is the (almost) full story. Ellie and Manny are expecting their first child, and Manny is obsessed with making life perfect and safe for the family. He is shown bringing a shell full of water to Ellie believing that she is giving birth, although this is just a false alarm. At the same time, Diego finds himself unable to catch an antelope he has been stalking. The antelope starts to aunt him. Believing that he is losing his predatory nature as a tiger, he decides to leave the herd after a talk with Manny. Sid grows jealous of Manny and Ellie and “adopts” three apparently abandoned eggs that he finds in an icy underground cavern. Manny tells him to put them back, but Sid instead looks after the eggs, which hatch into baby Tyrannosaurus the next morning. Although Sid tries his best to raise the three dinosaurs, their rambunctious behavior scares away all the other animals’ young and ruins a playground Manny built for Ellie’s baby. The mother dinosaur soon returns and carries both Sid and her youth underground, with Diego in pursuit. Manny, Ellie, Crash, and Eddie follow as well and discover that the icy cavern leads to a vast jungle populated by dinosaurs thought to be extinct. Here, an Ankylosaurus threatens the herd despite Diego’s efforts to fend it off; they are saved from a further crowd of angry reptiles by a one-eyed, slightly crazed weasel named Buckminster, or Buck. Buck has been living in this jungle for some time and chasing Rudy (a giant white Suchomimus that is this world’s biggest dinosaur), intending to avenge the eye he lost to it. He agrees to lead the herd through the jungle’s perils to Lava Falls, where “Momma” has taken Sid and her babies. In the meantime, Sid and the mother try to outdo each other in feeding the offspring; he loses this contest, but is soon welcomed into the family regardless. The next day, however, Rudy attacks the family and Sid is knocked onto a loose rock slab that is floating on a river of lava and about to plummet over the falls. As the herd moves toward Lava Falls, Ellie goes into labor and a Guanlong pack strikes, causing a rockslide that separates her from Manny and Diego. Manny doubles back to protect her and Diego fends off further attacks, while Buck takes Crash and Eddie ahead to rescue Sid. Just as the sloth goes over the falls, the trio swoops in on a commandeered pterosaur and saves his life. Manny reaches Ellie just as their baby is born, a girl they decide to name Peaches (the codeword they had chosen for Ellie to use if she went into labor during the trip). Sid is saddened at the fact that he never had a chance to say goodbye to "his" children as he is reunited with the herd. Before they can exit the jungle, Rudy attacks at full force; Buck helps the others ensnare him briefly, but he escapes and resumes his onslaught. The herd is saved by the timely arrival of Momma, who charges at Rudy and knocks him off a cliff. As she and her children wish Sid well, Buck – now without a purpose in life since Rudy is gone – decides to join the herd and live on the surface. However, a distant roar tells him that Rudy is still alive; he changes his mind and sends the herd home, blocking off the path to the underground jungle at the same time so that no one else can go down there. Manny and Ellie welcome Peaches into their frozen world and admit that Sid did a good job looking after Momma's children. Diego decides to remain with the herd, while Buck stays where he wants to be: underground, matching wits with Rudy. Scrat and Scratte As in the previous Ice Age films, Scrat does everything he can to retrieve his precious acorn. His efforts are complicated by the presence of Scratte, a female of his species, with whom he is instantly smitten. Scratte outsmarts him a number of times, once by demonstrating her ability to glide like a flying squirrel, but the two eventually fall in love after Scrat saves her from falling to her death in the lava river. He even chooses to focus his attention on her instead of the acorn until the end of the film, when he tires of her finicky nature and reverts to his old ways. The ensuing fight between the couple leads to a volcanic explosion that hurls Scrat and the acorn back to the surface, leaving Scratte trapped underground. As Scrat is about to enjoy his acorn, though, a stray piece of ice falls on him and knocks it back into Scratte’s hands. He screams in frustration, having lost both his love and his acorn. Characters * Manny - Ray Romano * Sid - John Leguizamo * Diego - Denis Leary * Ellie - Queen Latifah * Crash - Seann William Scott * Eddie - Josh Peck * Buck - Simon Pegg * Scrat - Chris Wedge * Scratte - Karen Disher * Gazelle - Bill Hader * Baby Dinos - Carlos Saldanha * Momma * Rudy * Peaches Announcement Rumors about a third Ice Age film started when Ice Age: The Meltdown's DVD said in the director commentaries that there was probably going to be made a third movie called "Ice Age: A New Begining". It wasn't until January 30, 2007 when Fox president Hutch Parker, based on the box office success of Ice Age: The Meltdown, announced and approved a third film. The movie is considered to be the biggest blockbuster this summer, with only Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen rivaling it. Promotions *The film's original trailer debuted with Horton Hears a Who! on March 14, 2008. There are three others that have been released, with the third and fourth which shows Buck. mostly closely resembling each other. *Queen Latifah recorded a cover of Walk the Dinosaur. The song's music video has been released. *More than three video clips have been released; one showing Diego, a few others featuring Sid, and one exclusive clip with the Ice Age gang meeting Manny and Ellie's newborn mini-mammoth. Reception Reviews have been mainly mixed. As of July 4, 2009, the film has a 46% "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, out of 125 reviews, with an average rating of 5.5/10http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1194515-ice_age_dawn_of_the_dinosaurs and a 37% from top critics. It has a score of 51 on Metacritic.http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/iceage3 However, critic Roger Ebert ultimately gave the film a three and a half star out of four review saying: "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" is the best of the three films about our friends in the inter-species herd of plucky prehistoric heroes. And it involves some of the best use of 3-D I've seen in an animated feature."http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090629/REVIEWS/906299995 Box office The movie has made $13,791,157 on an opening day at the box office.http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=iceage3.htm It reached approximately $42,500,000 on its opening weekend at #1, according to studio estimates, tying last week's champion Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The actual grosses might declare a victor between the two. It grossed $67,506,000 after 5 days, $148,000,000 internationally for a total of $215,506,000 for the first week. Soundtrack The musical scores were done by John Powell who did the scores for the previous movie. Queen Latifah's cover of Walk the Dinosaur was used to promote the movie though it doesn't appear in the soundtrack. Video game A video game was released on June 30, 2009. Trivia * Dawn of the Dinosaurs is approximately set one and a half years after the events of the second film, this is based on the fact that Ellie's pregnancy lasted around a normal elephant's, and that she is close to giving birth at the start of the movie. * Although the film focuses on dinosaurs coming to Earth, the second film made it clear that the dinosaurs were extinct before this time. Manny mentions that the dinosaurs went extinct. * Throughout the movie there is sunlight in the Dinosaur Valley, and when Buck tells the story of when he fought Rudy there is rain and lightning. How is this possible if they are underground? * Sid finds the Tyrannosaurus Rex's eggs in an Ice Cave. No egg could survive in such a cold environment without a constant source body heat from the parent. External links *Official website *Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs at the Internet Movie Database *Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs at Rotten Tomatoes *Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs at Allmovie Category:Movies Category:Featured